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The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when King George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense of social and political instability, and the first beginnings of the bishop's ill health.
Doubtless she was saved from many of those little bitternesses and restraints and disappointments which all well-bred city children must suffer in the course of their training for the more or less factitious life of society: obligations to remain very still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb revolt; the injustice of being found troublesome and being sent to bed early for the comfort of her elders; the cruel necessity of straining her pretty eyes, for many long hours at a time, over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without; the austere constrains and heavy drowsiness of warm churches, filled with the droning echoes of a voice preaching incomprehensible things; the progressively augmenting weariness of lessons in deportment, in dancing, in music, in the impossible art of keeping her dresses unruffled and unsoiled.
But by their hearty manner of keeping this annual festival, by the hospitality which the farmers and rich men showed to their labourers and poorer neighbours, they promoted, at any rate, "goodwill amongst men" old animosities, quarrels, and bitternesses were forgotten, and the hearts of the poor cheered.
Poor lady! her life had been one long martyrdom, all the more hard to bear because it was made up for the most part of small annoyances, petty mortifications, little recurring incessant bitternesses.
But she will be able to console herself for those and similar bitternesses by the knowledge that on the whole the world honours those who battle against ill-fortune without complaint far above the needy crowd of spongers who strive to batten without effort on the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich. Well, we are jest a going for to have a fine time of it in the old Citty, we are!
Then had come a moment of horror and incredulous despair, and that black moment had hardened into eternity. Nightmare is hideous, and Archie's very life had become a nightmare. Of course he would get over it, like his cousin, though, unlike his cousin, he did not think so; and their different moods had their different bitternesses.
But here, alas, was an aspiration for the saints, not for weak men with known bitternesses and passions in their blood, and all youth's furies hot upon them. And surely in that other summons there was, besides, the thrill of romance, such as the young love. There was the trumpeting to high adventure.
"If she can sing and dance as she done nine years ago, I shouldn't wonder," answered Black Andy smoothly. These two men knew each other; they had said hard things to each other for many a year, yet they lived on together unshaken by each other's moods and bitternesses. "I'm getting old, I'm seventy-nine, and I ain't for long," urged Aunt Kate, looking Abel in the eyes.
His health, his work, his money-matters, his love-affairs, were all getting into a more and more lamentable condition, in which Mme. d'Albany's sympathy came as a blessing, when the catastrophes of 1814 and 1815, which to Italy meant the commencement of a state of degradation and misery much more intolerable and hopeless than any previous one, came and drowned the various bitternesses of poor Foscolo's life in a sea of bitterness.
William III. was no longer at the head of affairs in Europe; and the triumvirate of Heinsius, Marlborough, and Prince Eugene did not view the aggregate of things from a sufficiently calm height to free themselves from the hatreds and, bitternesses of the strife, when the proposals of Louis XIV. arrived at the Hague.
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